Thursday, 6 September 2012

Immigration, poverty, fake charities

It's a milestone step that the left can no longer dismiss concerns over immigration as racist or bonkers. Paradoxically, we probably have Gordon Brown to thank for this; his deluded and paranoid 'bigoted woman' comments on the eminently sane Gillian Duffy's mild questioning exposed Labour's lunatic purblindness like nothing else. Now Frank Field can join Nick Soames in penning a Mail column that sets out without obfuscation how Labour increased immigration from 50k a year to 250k a year between 1997 and 2010 without a clamour of condemnation flooding the bankrupt Guardian. This is a good thing. Mental Brown's ex aide Justin Forsyth meanwhile has jumped from the madness of the bunker to running one of Labour's foremost fake charities, Save the Children, without managing to shed the insanity of redistributionism. Christian Guy in the Speccie does a succinct demolition job on Forsyth's mendacious and ill-advised recent ad campaign so I shalln't bother. However, until the verity of the message that Welfarism is the biggest cause of poverty gains the same acceptance as the immigration argument, we will continue to see such risible nonsense bubble up from Labour from time to time. Meanwhile the bonkers and bankrupt Guardian opts to remain in away-with-the-fairies land; Peter Wilby, who looks every inch a chap with a three storey townhouse in W11 under his belt, writes "After the reshuffle, Ed Miliband should realise that voters are focused
on jobs, benefits and rents, not on pensions, shares and house prices". Ah, so at a time of national crisis we move to stoke the flames of class war, do we Peter? Well, I'd have expected nothing less.

Yet very many employees in the public sector are all too aware of the issues with pensions and house prices and they are alleged to be part of Labour's core support. Moreover there are all those retired public sector workers who invested with their lump sums. So is it more of an age thing?